"Energising a Sustainable Industry" is the guiding theme of Hannover Messe 2024. This year, the world's largest industrial trade fair is focussing on innovations for the sustainable production and energy supply of the future. Solutions for CO2-neutral production, AI-based technologies and green hydrogen production are on display.
Whether in the construction of buildings, the extraction and transportation of raw materials or the production of building materials such as concrete, the construction industry produces enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and, according to the Federal Environment Agency, consumes more than 70% of all raw materials mined in Germany. To conserve resources and the environment in equal measure, renewable building materials such as wood, straw and hemp are becoming increasingly important.
As part of its bioeconomy research funding programme, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) aims to combine biotechnology with other promising future fields. These include artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, computer science and engineering. This is because innovations and disruptive developments are increasingly emerging at the boundaries between disciplines.
Whether dowels, egg spoons or armature boards: plastics are omnipresent. Because the mostly petroleum-based materials are light, durable and versatile in industry. At the same time, their production from fossil raw materials often releases large quantities of the climate-damaging greenhouse gas CO2. Experts therefore see great potential in the use of bio-based plastics in lightweight construction to reduce CO2 emissions in industry.
Clean air is important - also for the so-called springtails, a widespread class of arthropods. The animals, which are only a few millimeters in size, have a special feature: they almost all breathe exclusively through their skin. As organisms that frequently live on the ground, springtails face the challenge of keeping this very skin as free as possible from pollutants and pathogens so as not to endanger their respiration. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research in Dresden have now discovered how the animals manage this.
Foamed plastics are frequently used for packaging. They are mostly made of polystyrene, polyethylene or polyurethane - and are thus ultimately based on petroleum. The production process is clearly not sustainable, and the situation is often no better at the product's end of life: After a single use, they are usually discarded - even if done correctly, foamed materials are rarely recycled today. Instead, they end up in thermal recycling.
Fiber composites made from bio-based raw materials are increasingly in demand in industry. They are set to replace materials previously based on glass or carbon fibers or even basalt or aramid fibers. The intention is to produce more sustainable products, because the previous variants are very energy-intensive, both in production and in recycling. Yet sustainability is not to be achieved at the expense of processability or material properties.
Stability is probably the most important property of concrete. Reinforcements with steel or synthetic fibers serve to give the building material even more stability. But neither steel nor glass or carbon fibers are ecologically sustainable. A team of researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Wood Research (WKI) and Biberach University of Applied Sciences has now investigated whether natural fibers could be an alternative.
It is not only Bundesliga clubs that rely on artificial turf for their playing surfaces. Smaller clubs also prefer the low-maintenance and weather-independent material and are making the necessary investments. There are already around 9,000 artificial turf pitches in Germany. But these have so far been based on fossil raw materials and contribute to microplastics entering the environment. The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has calculated that artificial turf pitches in Europe are responsible for 16,000 tons of microplastics in the environment every year.